I didn't know where else to put this, it's more a 'weird story to come out of Covid' ... saw it in New Scientist and thought ok this is clever but maybe we can come up with a more reliable way
Negative Amazon reviews of scented candles may indicate the number of covid-19 cases in the community and could even predict infection spikes.
Viral Twitter posts have suggested that Amazon reviews for highly scented products could highlight the extent in the population of anosmia,
or a loss of smell, a key covid-19 symptom. To learn more, Nick Beauchamp at Northeastern University, Massachusetts, and his colleagues analysed 9837 Amazon reviews of four best-selling scented candles produced by the brand Yankee Candle. All were posted between September 2018 and December 2021.
They noted the number of reviews that said the candles had no smell and compared them with reported covid-19 cases in the US.
The research “started out as a joke”, says Beauchamp, however, the team found a link between covid-19 cases and negative candle reviews. For every 100,000 new covid-19 cases a week in the US over the study period, the number of Yankee Candle reviews saying the product had no smell went up by 0.25 percentage points. A statistical analysis revealed this link wasn’t a chance finding...
The team presented the work at the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media in June.